Ben Carter
speaker
694 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2013
last heard Aug 2018
Ben Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now, as a comparison, say the Netherlands were to play one of the teams outside the FIFA top 150, like Indonesia in a friendly match, they'd get a much lower number of points, only about 140 points.
But unfortunately for the orange hordes of Dutch fans, that's exactly what their team did earlier this year.
The amazing thing is that if they hadn't played that game against Indonesia, they would have been one of the top seeds for next year's World Cup.
Of course, they won that game easily, but nonetheless, it brought their average down.
Oops.
And they're not the only ones to make this mistake.
If Italy hadn't played a friendly against San Marino, a side which have only ever won one game in their history, Italy would have been a top seed at this World Cup too.
Absolutely.
Oops.
Crunching the FIFA points reveals a clear message for the world's top teams, according to Edouard Randuc, who runs the stats crunching website footballrankings.info.
So the clever thing to do is not to play friendlies against lower-ranking teams.
But unfortunately, my beloved England have also been at it, choosing to play friendlies against Sweden, Scotland and Ireland.
If they'd not played those games, and everyone else meanwhile had continued to play these foolish friendlies, England would have qualified as top seed for this World Cup.
And what hurts is it's not like they weren't warned.
It's not a bad idea.
If the rules are broken, then the game doesn't count as an official FIFA friendly.
And only official FIFA friendlies count towards your average.
So you can make the game unofficial by, for example, making too many substitutes.
And as a result, the winning team would not have their points average dragged down.
Putting less value on teams from certain continents can seem unfair.
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